The Stark Terrain of "The Outlaw Album"

The reader's introduction to any of Daniel Woodrell's stories is a clang of doom. "Morrow wondered if he might soon die because of a beautiful girl from his teens he'd never had the nerve to approach." This is typical of opening sentences in Woodrell’s short story collection The Outlaw Album. Non-decisions have just as much impact as bad ones. A horrifying combination of despair and accident exists in his characters' tales. Life is taxing and dark, danger is never too far off, and if you don't get mired in it this time, you are bound to the next time around.

In “Black Step,” Woodrell illustrates the life of a modern soldier with a gritty clarity that portrays the struggles of the returned as well as anything I've previously read. His protagonist, Darden, joined the army to become more interesting than his peers; overgrown boys who cruised the same bars night after night, hoping to get laid. Now that he has survived the desert the empty simplicity of those evenings is no longer available to him. Darden can’t even remember the desire to fuck or be touched. He remains at a remove, seeing his past as frequently as he sees his present, relishing graves that disappear.

The Outlaw Album isn't a collection to dive into without premeditation. I frequently noticed that I was steeling myself for the next encounter. Woodrell's language is spare, amplifying the intensity of what occurs. In an era where so much is packaged for our immediate satisfaction and instant entertainment, the weight of Woodrell's stories feel all the more poignant and necessary. Their edges are sharp and jagged. They not only cut into our consciousness but leave a corrugated mark as a reminder of what was learned.

Viewers of last year’s film “Winter’s Bone” will be familiar with the ferocity of Woodrell’s tales. He is the author of the novel and the filmmakers captured something of the sparse despair of the regular days of his characters; their shots floating across run down properties that are encapsulated in a persistent, dour grey.

The austerity of Woodrell’s prose puts him in league with Hemingway but tacks closer to Raymond Carber. Like Carver he writes of hard drinking, lost men, and determined, stern women. He excavates communities that we are not or comfortable, accustomed to, reading about. Readers of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories may be more at ease with Woodrell’s terrain but he takes a different tone. There is filter on his lens and what is delivered is stark and harsh. Moments of possibility and beauty are not absent, but they are pared down to their essence. The presence of an artistic flourish would undermine the truth of what Woodrell creates and he has no need for them.

To infer that the absence of flourish means a cut and dry tone would be a mistake. Woodrell is a master of his craft and has a command of multiple writing styles. He is first person and third, brother and daughter, violent and loyal. Each hardscrabble character in Woodrell’s collection has a different story of upset and survival to tell. Recuperative periods are suggested between each portrait of life that he presents, but Woodrell’s book is a rare and raw piece of work that should garner the admiration and attention of its readers and perforate the heart.

Harbach Wins Fans with Debut

On occasion there are fictional characters whose lives you can imagine beyond the pages of the book they reside in. One feels like one has been given a window into their experience, not as if they have been created solely to prove a point or tell a single story. The characters in Chad Harbach’s debut novel The Art of Fielding are these sorts of people. When I reached the last page, in a matter of days despite the novel’s bulk, I was sure that Henry, Schwartz, and their teammates would continue on with their lives, and it was my loss to no longer be a witness.

Henry Skrimshander is a kid from South Dakota for whom baseball is the only thing. He plays shortstop with an effortless kind of beauty that Mike Schwartz spots immediately. Schwartz is a student at Westish College, a small, fictional school in Wisconsin. A hulking, stereotypical form of an athlete, Schwartz recognizes the kind of talent he always wished he possessed and decides to help Henry realize his potential. Schwartz himself is perhaps the most compelling character. He pursues law school as vehemently as he coaches the best from his teammates but finds himself skidding to a confused stop and searching for what actually anchors and drives him.

Schwartz changes Henry’s life drastically, shifting its course from community college student to rising baseball star of Westish. Henry’s arrival on campus exposes him to grueling, vivid training sessions and introduces him to his roommate Owen, one of the book’s fulcrums.

Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish, and his daughter Pella, are actors off the baseball field. Affenlight is a wonderful, scholarly figure, whom we see stirred by unexpected desires. His daughter has returned to him after a botched, early marriage, and is trying to land on her feet. Both characters add a dash of relativity to the events on the field, though struggles are not placed in a hierarchy.

Often I found myself pausing over Harbach’s sentences for the pleasure of rereading them. He is inclined to describe people with food in mind and I was happy to be sent to the dictionary more than once, though fuchsin was perhaps unnecessary since fuchsia works just as well. Quite a lot of reference was made to the “hip hop anthem of the moment,” a tired means of expressing the wilted nature of the surrounding college culture. But happily much is made of 19th century literary bastions, particularly Melville, whose brief, rediscovered visit to Westish earns the college athletes their name, the Harpooners.

The relationships in The Art of Fielding are fragile. Some of the relationships constructed by Harbach seem founded on very little. But then that can be the case; an incidental bond at the heart of something that grows almost without encouragement or reason. Their basis resides in the familial, loyalty, awe.

For much of the novel Henry is an obedient puppy dog to Schwartz’s insistent regime of vicarious success. But Henry’s relationship with baseball founders at the novel’s center, calling into question his purpose. He is infamous for his errorless play, and just as he ties the record of his hero, he throws an errant ball. The consequences multiply and set numerous, irreversible events in motion.

The Art of Fielding educates the reader about passion as well as confusion, prejudice, and baseball. As someone for whom sports are incidental, the novel was a consistent pleasure if not a comprehensive course on America’s favorite pastime.

History, Fables Meld in "The Tiger's Wife"

In her rich and often startling debut, The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht exhibits an attraction to wonder, and a finely tuned talent for storytelling. Natalia is a young doctor in an unnamed Balkan country, which is still recovering from the effects of the recent war. While traveling across the border to administer vaccinations at an orphanage, she learns that her grandfather has died. Her grandfather was a doctor himself. His death is the crux of the novel and his life is its bulk.

Old world superstitions are close to the surface in the landscape of The Tiger’s Wife. Near the orphanage a family is vigorously digging up the vineyards. They are suffering from tuberculosis, but refuse treatment. The patriarch is convinced they are sick because he has not yet found the remains of his cousin. A cousin he had to leave behind during the war and buried under the vineyard. Natalia is pragmatic, a woman of science, and knows this can’t be true. But as her time across the border unfolds, interspersed with the narrative of her grandfather, everything begins to seem possible.

Natalia’s grandfather is an equally practical man of medicine, whose experience was nevertheless deeply tied to the lore of the tiger’s wife and his repeated encounters with the deathless man. The narrator, Natalia, invents or extrapolates the background details of the main players in these stories, deepening and obscuring the realities. In her hands no one is an open book.

The tiger who appears in her grandfather’s village is just one example of someone with a storied past. He is an escaped resident of a zoo miles away. His unexpected freedom is the result of a rain of bombs, missiles that liberate him even as they crush the lives of others. The abused, deaf-mute wife of the village butcher does not respond to the tiger’s presence with fear, and neither does Natalia’s grandfather, who is excited to know the Jungle Book’s Shere Kahn is in his own woods. The tiger’s former life depended on familiarity with the hand that fed him, which leads him to the butcher’s wife, inspiring terror and suspicion in her neighbors. Every piece is part of a bigger lattice, brought together by unique turns of fate. Life wouldn’t have it any other way. The tiger turns the village of Gallina topsy-turvy, and convinces her grandfather that he must get out.

Natalia herself is not as vivid as the subjects of her stories. She is a witness to the war, and tries to be a part of the remedy. But her character is mostly built on her grandfather’s stories and her affection for him. Natalia’s love for her grandfather is deep, but not particularly complex. Her father is a markedly absent presence, and this is never discussed, putting more weight on the relationship with her grandfather. Natalia’s rebellions are brief and her grandfather’s pursuits quickly become her own. Perhaps it is a relief in the chaos of war to follow so closely in someone else’s path.

Obreht’s descriptions are rich and affecting. She is terrifically young, barely 26, and was born in Belgrade, moving to the US at the age of 12. Amongst these stories certainly lie parts of her own understanding of her history. Her subject is heavy but she handles beauty just as well and can spot moments of humor amidst acts of betrayal and destruction. Obreht undeniably recognizes human fallibility; she casts light on manipulative actions without judgment, merely incorporating them into the fabric of her tale. People are human and they keep themselves sane through the little fictions they tell themselves. At some point, who is to say what is real and what is merely possible.

Interest is Drowned in "The Lake"

The coupling of the protagonists in Banana Yoshimoto's novel The Lake is begun in a cinematic fashion. Chihiro starts observing Nakajima from the sill of her window. They begin exchanging cross-alley waves and she grows comfortable in the familiarity of his presence. Waves lead to coffee and all at once he is spending most nights in her apartment, carefully reimbursing her for the extra heat and groceries he uses. They sleep together a single time. And it is a lonely and sexually pleasureless union. The two seem to have bumbled into each other’s company. Their accidental merger is a reflection of quiet desperation more than an enjoyment of companionship.

Chihiro has moved to Tokyo from the village where she spent her childhood. Her mother is dying of cancer when she leaves, and after her death Chihiro finds very little to tie her to her home. Not even the presence of her father affects her affiliation to the place. She has her art degree and is a muralist of a vague amount of minor fame. When she begins her time with Nakajima she has been enlisted to paint a mural on a wall of the local school. The piece grows to represent much more than a project as her relationship with Nakajima takes shape.

Nakajima is a mysterious figure and we are meant to wonder what lies behind his oddities, including his inability to want and enjoy sex. He is a brilliant Ph.D. student, who has lost himself to his studies in the past and opens himself up very little. Chihiro begins to suspect that there is a shady reason for all his strangeness, suspicions that are confirmed when he brings her to the lake.
At the lake we meet an even stranger pair than Chihiro and Nakajima. They are a shrunken brother and sister pair, Mino and Chii. He entertains the guests, serving them the best tea Chihiro has ever had, while his sister sleeps in a room nearby. Chii’s almost always asleep, and when she does rouse herself, she communicates through Mino, who seems to channel her words telepathically. Chihiro is not sure what this duo explains about Nakajima’s past, but she knows it is the key to his difficulties and his uncomfortable manner.

Aside from the improbable nature of their meeting, there is no real romance between Chihiro and Nakajima and I had a hard time feeling a resonance in their connection. Both have lost their mothers and are marooned in the seclusion of their own worlds. It’s fathomable that this on its own can bring people together but that magnetism remains absent. Chihiro’s language frequently vacillates between security in her affection for her companion and allusions to a shadowy naiveté of sentiment. Her inability to truly fixate on Nakajima, often felt like the fault of mistranslation. Whatever the cause, the result was frustration with unknowable characters, their emotions and actions too perforated to complete a whole.

Yoshimoto's prose is incredibly sparse. Her subjects in The Lake are very often odd and perhaps the basic nature of her language is meant to temper the peculiarities that inhabit her worlds. I kept slowing down and looking for something that might send me to the dictionary or at least pique my interest. Instead I was shuttled from the apartment, to the schoolyard, to dreams of Paris, to the lake. I couldn’t care very much. How much is at stake when the complicated pasts of protagonists aren’t synthesized into an engaging future? The loneliness of Chihiro and Nakajima didn’t play on my sympathies. And what did it matter if they found each other if there was no one to care?

"Tough Without a Gun:" A Flat Tale of a Dimensional Star

My beginnings as a cinephile were unusual, going, as I did, to a Waldorf school where TV was frowned upon, and belonging, as I did, to obedient parents. My sister and I were, however, allowed the requisite one or two movies on the weekend. Disney was verboten, so there was a lot of Shirley Temple flicks, which graduated into Rogers and Astaire, and finally, pivotally, Noir.

The foreign twang of the word was enough to satisfy me and my 14-year-old cohorts; eager, budding culture snobs that we were. Sleepovers were popcorn-packed nights of Hitchcock, Gilda, The Third Man, and Humphrey Bogart. Finally, ultimately, Humphrey. We fell for the cantankerous, weather beaten antihero as so many had before us, sketching out lines from To Have and Have Not in our margins and whistling for our imaginary Steves. (To my everlasting delight, my high school sweetheart met my Lauren Bacall in full rumrunner regalia one Halloween.)

All this is by way of saying that I had to read “Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart” by Stefan Kanfer. I was excited to learn about my gruff idol, find out if he was the face of the Gerber baby, and how it was that he had dodged his third wife (whom he called “Slugger”) to make Lauren his fourth.

I got my answers but the delivery was a little dull. Kanfer clearly reveres the star and faithfully takes his readers through Bogart’s life, which began in 1899. Humphrey was born to a well-to-do family in New York City, the eldest, with two younger sisters. Although bright, he rebelled against authority and it was evident early on that he would not be following in his father’s footsteps toward the medical profession.

Bogart got his start on Broadway, as most stars had to at the time. He married and divorced, slowly rising to roles of more prominence. Upon Bogart’s move to Hollywood, Kanfer patiently unpacks his cinematic choices and outlines how one sort of movie led to another, culminating in the films that define how Bogart is viewed today: He is renowned as classic, unshakably masculine. He withholds his affection but there is tenderness beneath the crust.

Kanfer spends a good amount of time quoting reviews from the era. He details the many ways that history intersected with Bogart’s career, affecting his trajectory as a star and sculpting his image. These tie-ins were often striking, and yet when Kanfer directly quotes his subject, Humphrey never comes off the page. Even Kanfer’s descriptions of Hollywood and the Bogarts’ travels in Africa fall flat. There are glimmers of dimension but ultimately the biographer sticks too close to his facts without illuminating the contours of the scenes or personalities. I never felt like I got to know Kanfer’s subject better, though he handled the impact of Bogart’s afterlife with much more skill.

My sense is that the author’s respect for the figure and for his family outweighed his desire to make Bogart human. The decision to avoid sensationalist guesses about his fidelity is admirable, but Kanfer’s whitewashed approach is tiresome. Somewhere there is a happy medium, maybe the next biographer will reach it. Because it is obvious that though Bogart reached his cinematic heights in his 40s, and died more than 50 years ago, this is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Fourth Novel is a Finely Tunned "Tale" of Wealth

Julia Glass is the author of a wonderful book called “Three Junes” (which you can always get a copy of at the bookstore “Three Lives,” read it to find out why). Last fall she published her latest novel “The Widower’s Tale.” It’s largest and perhaps only real flaw is the title. The book is about much more than the charming, cantankerous, widowed Percival Darling and the title oozes a treacly sentiment that is absent in the novel.

Glass is partial to male narrators and the four we have in “The Widower’s Tale” are a diverse bunch. The aforementioned Percy lives on the property where his wife died 30 odd years ago in an accident for which he thinks he is to blame. The novel opens as his barn is being transformed into a fancy pre-school, a surprising decision fueled by his desire to ground his eldest daughter. Ira is one of the teachers at Elves and Fairies. He is damaged, recovering from the harsh loss of his previous job as a result of false accusations stemming from his sexuality. Then there is Celestino, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala whose life looked immeasurably brighter before he fell in love with his patron’s daughter years before. The youngest protagonist is Robert, Percy’s grandson, a bright boy at Harvard, blithely following his mother’s footsteps toward med-school.

Circumstance and humanity bring these lives into the same orbit in crucial ways. Percy’s careful widowhood is reshuffled by a new love and the pleasures, risks and heartbreaks associated. He is the only character given a first person narrative and his voice is often hilarious in its high brow, dry humor. The reader experiences Percy’s awakening in an immediate manner, and we find ourselves puzzled and righteously appalled by the privilege that has altered his small town into something he finds absurdly gentrified.

Robert, Celestino, and Ira’s stories are interesting but they lack the vibrancy of Percy’s voice. Each character’s transformation is crucial and fleshes out another dimension of current society.

The novel is not just of men. But they are our lenses, a perspective Glass manages quite well, faltering only with the college age slang Robert and his roommate Turo mouth. Almost across the board Glass’s women are tough. As mothers, doctors, scholars, and even lovers, they have a somewhat fierce outer layer that their men want to penetrate. I liked these women well enough, but my understanding of them was less complete, more fractured, and I wanted to be better acquainted with their weaknesses and their drive.

Issues of the moment are central to the narrative. The novel encompasses capitalist greed, gay marriage, illegal immigration and the seepage of technology into the way we live. This is not done obliquely or in a preacher’s tone. The subjects’ presence never feels forced (unlike the racial and class crossings that occur in the popular “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” by Helen Simonson). Percy’s wealthy Boston suburb becomes the victim of a mysterious eco-terrorism group, clever pranks he initially finds amusing. The impact of these attempts to right an imbalance in wealth and spotlight an abuse of resources is both startling and thought provoking. The logic might be sound, but the execution is badly misdirected.

What I ultimately appreciated about Glass’s novel is that very little is neatly packaged at its conclusion. Like many novels before it, it ends with a wedding. But the event felt more like a beginning of something or a continuation for all the characters. There were no clear answers or sure destinies, but the possibility of transformative opportunities just might be on the horizon.

Visiting with Egan's "Goon Squad"

Winning an award for your work is inevitably an honor and for some readers the mark of the Pulitzer Prize is a compelling emblem; for others it is intimidating. This year’s winner is a laudable accomplishment as well as a comprehensible and engaging read. In fact the most elusive feature of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is the title.

The first chapter, and first story, introduces us to Sasha. She is a thirty-something single woman in New York, discussing her most recent setback with her shrink. The scene is typical so far. Sasha, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac and her fervid encounter with an online date concludes in forgettable sex and a poignant theft.

Sasha's story introduces a few of the characters who appear in the successive stories. Egan cleverly extracts minor figures from early stories and fleshes out their worlds as the book proceeds. For a time, the reader is traveling backward in time, retracing history, but ultimately we arrive somewhere in the future. While Sasha’s presence is a fundamental thread in the book, she never entirely reclaims the narrative as her own. The reader pieces her life together through the eyes of her contemporaries and acquaintances, and we learn almost as much about them along the way. It is fair to say that the story is no more hers than it is any of theirs.

“Goon Squad” follows its population of protagonists to Naples, Africa, and the suburbs, but it always returns to New York. The city harbors the wounded and spits out the derelict. It is a place where gifted musicians become riverside fishermen, PR magnates light their guests on fire, people find their callings, and others find themselves selling their foundering souls. By reconnecting with Egan’s characters in different stages of their lives, we become acquainted with a panorama of their choices. Throughout the book their mistakes and triumphs come into focus and give them a very human identity. An aging producer who seduces young girls is also a father and a mentor while an American sweetheart actress morphs into a political rebel. Egan’s characters are unfailingly complex, and like most people, they continue to surprise us.

In addition to the creative tool of intersecting but not continuous or chronological storylines, Egan uses a variety of methods to tell her story. A troubled college student speaks about himself entirely in the second person, until he reaches a mental climax and collapse. A young girl illustrates the fluctuating complications of her family via power point, and a few conversations are had entirely via abbreviated Ts, a form of texting reduced further than our own. These methods reflect both time and states of mind.

Egan’s characters' narratives come together like puzzle pieces. It is a sly approach and one that Egan executes with grace. It is somewhat disappointing, however, not to acquire a full view of any one of her characters. This is partly a compliment to Egan's craftsmanship as a writer that we want to intimately understand everyone she creates. But the sliver we are given, no matter how substantial, is never enough. Arguably our chagrin at remaining on the fringes of these realities should be swallowed in homage to artistic license. Egan is, perhaps, using these slices to paint a larger picture. I resented the deprivation nonetheless. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a novel in short stories. I am a fan of both genres and Egan’s book is a well-developed delight, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d had one or the other because both didn’t give me enough of either.